Happy 2013. We are now officially a dozen years into the century. This is as good a time as any to imagine what the next dozen years leading up to the 2025 milestone might have in store.

The reason is simple – if you cannot imagine the future, you will never play a part in shaping it. What is worse, the future that you have been blind to can blindside you. We all know how 2012 played out; this may not help us in 2025. As Macbeth, who helped with the title for this article, also reminds us that “all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”

Unfortunately, our collective track record for imagination has not been stellar. We have a tendency to get excited about the news that spikes in the near-term and that colors our view of the longer term ahead.

To get a sense of just how bad this cognitive dissonance can be, imagine you were back at the dawn of the century in January 2000, perhaps celebrating the non-event of the past year: the Y2K bug that fizzled. This was already a harbinger of more misconceptions about the most significant developments of a dozen years to come.